Formatting GoldMine email templates (pt 2)

Further to a post we put up a few days ago (here) here’s another handy tip.

Mention was made in the original post of a way to stop any formatting in a message that you’re replying to upsetting the layout of your own template, causing double spacing, random font changes and other undesireable effects.

The suggestion was to turn off the ‘include original message when replying’ switch in Options and to insert the ‘quote text for reply/fwd’ field into the template instead. Unfortunately, this doesn’t work in GMPE 8.5.2 (it will again in v9) and, besides, sometimes you might want to forward an email and preserve its original layout.

The solution is simple. Take the HTML content of your template and save it as a text file. Now delete everything in the template and, from the ‘Insert Field’ drop-down add the ‘Cursor Position’ field first and then, next to it rather than on a new line, add the ‘Include a text file’ field. In the dialogue box that appears simply point to the file you saved earlier.

This arrangement seems to solve all of the formatting problems that people have reported and you can turn the ‘include original message when replying’ switch back on again.

GoldMine templates can be temperamental, and some people have had problems even when writing new emails as well as replies. As far as we can tell, keeping your templates as separate text files cures all of these oddities.

There are other advantages as well: if you want to change someone’s template you only have to edit their template file rather than logging in as them and calling up the template. Also, you can very easily use Dreamweaver, or similar, to create the layout that you want.